Female Chickadees Cheat With Smarter Males to Give Their Chicks Better Memories

High in the Sierra Nevada, a mountain chickadee drops onto an aluminum frame strung with eight identical feeders, hesitates, hops to the wrong one, then the wrong one again, before finally finding the single door that yields a sunflower seed. The bird flits off to cache it. Every visit, every fumble, every clean hit is ... Read more The post Female Chickadees Cheat With Smarter Males to Give Their Chicks Better Memories appeared first on Wild Science.

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Mongooses Plan Their Battles Days Before the Enemy Shows Up

On a termite mound somewhere in the Limpopo bush, a dwarf mongoose hauls itself up onto its hind legs, scans the scrub, and starts to sing. It is a small, chirruping watchman’s song, the sound of a sentinel telling the rest of its group that someone is on guard. But whether it bothers to announce ... Read more The post Mongooses Plan Their Battles Days Before the Enemy Shows Up appeared first on Wild Science.

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A Brain Implant That Listens for Every Footstep Cuts Falls in Parkinson’s

The swing of a leg lasts less than half a second. In that sliver of time, the foot leaves the ground, travels forward, and lands again, and the brain has to orchestrate the whole thing while keeping the body upright. For people with Parkinson’s disease, that orchestration falters. Steps shorten, lurch, lose their symmetry, and ... Read more The post A Brain Implant That Listens for Every Footstep Cuts Falls in Parkinson’s appeared first on NeuroEdge.

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A Graveyard of 10 Million Whales Has Been Found Nearly Seven Kilometers Down

Three elongated vertebrae, sheathed in a pale fuzz of microbial mat, resting in the dark almost 6,800 meters below the surface of the Indian Ocean. They belonged to a beaked whale that died somewhere overhead and sank. What gathered on its bones afterward, the worms and brittle stars and tiny grazing snails, is now the ... Read more The post A Graveyard of 10 Million Whales Has Been Found Nearly Seven Kilometers Down appeared first on SciChi.

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The Kids Are All Right: Zoo Ponies Stay Calm Under Petting Yet Bolt at an Excavator

The children kept coming, small hands reaching over the fence to pat a pony’s neck while it pulled hay from a rack and chewed, unbothered. Around the eight Gotland russ horses at Slottsskogen park in Gothenburg, the spring afternoon was all noise and motion: infants squealing, adults leaning in, the general low chaos of a ... Read more The post The Kids Are All Right: Zoo Ponies Stay Calm Under Petting Yet Bolt at an Excavator appeared first on Wild Science.

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To Find New Physics, an AI First Has to Forget the Old Physics It Learned

Teach a machine everything we know about the universe, and you might expect it to spot the cracks in that knowledge faster. The opposite can happen. A neural network trained on the standard picture of the cosmos sometimes turns that education into a blind spot, quietly forcing strange new signals into familiar old boxes. Which ... Read more The post To Find New Physics, an AI First Has to Forget the Old Physics It Learned appeared first on NeuroEdge.

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Two-Week Brain Tumor Test, Done in Twelve Minutes

The glass slide is nothing special. A sliver of brain tumor, fixed in paraffin, sliced thinner than a hair and washed in the same two dyes pathologists have leaned on for more than a century: hematoxylin to stain the cell nuclei a bruised purple, eosin to wash the rest a dusty pink. Hospitals everywhere make these. A scanner turns one into a digital image, and that image goes to a piece of software called Hetairos.

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Why Antidepressants Make You Feel Worse Before They Make You Feel Better

Anyone who has started taking an SSRI knows the cruel little paradox of the first few weeks. You swallow the pill meant to lift your mood, and at first your mood does the opposite. The anxiety sharpens. Sleep frays. And then, somewhere around week three or four, if you stick with it, the fog begins ... Read more The post Why Antidepressants Make You Feel Worse Before They Make You Feel Better appeared first on NeuroEdge.

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How Supergiant Deep-Sea Isopods Survive Years Without Eating

Cut open a supergiant isopod hauled up from nearly a kilometre down, and the first thing you notice is the stomach. It fills roughly two-thirds of the body cavity, packed tight with a finely ground, mud-like paste of whatever the animal last managed to scavenge from the seabed. Everything else, the legs, the armoured plates, ... Read more The post How Supergiant Deep-Sea Isopods Survive Years Without Eating appeared first on Wild Science.

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Hawaiʻi’s Last False Killer Whales Are Starving in a Warming Sea

From a few hundred feet up, a drone can read a whale’s body the way a doctor reads a chart. Width at the head, width across the midsection, the long taper toward the flukes: feed those numbers into the right equations and you get volume, and from volume, an estimate of mass. One false killer ... Read more The post Hawaiʻi’s Last False Killer Whales Are Starving in a Warming Sea appeared first on Wild Science.

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Four-Winged Raptor May Have Hunted China’s Earliest Birds

The bird bones at Changma come in clusters, broken and crushed into tight little pellets, the kind of thing a modern owl coughs up after a meal. Hundreds of prehistoric birds, scattered through a fossil bed in northwestern China, some of them mangled in a way that screamed predator. For years nobody could say what ... Read more The post Four-Winged Raptor May Have Hunted China’s Earliest Birds appeared first on Wild Science.

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A Blood-Feeding Fly Dims Its Own Eyes Once It Settles on a Host

At one end of the family sits the tsetse fly, a strong flier with big eyes that picks out a buffalo or a person from across an African clearing. At the other end live the bat flies, eyeless or nearly so, scuttling through fur in the dark and almost never leaving their host. Two ways ... Read more The post A Blood-Feeding Fly Dims Its Own Eyes Once It Settles on a Host appeared first on Wild Science.

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Probe Thinner Than a Hair Can Now Listen to Brain Cells and Boss Them Around at the Same Time

The thing is narrower than a single human hair, and along its silicon length sit close to a thousand tiny recording points and twenty-eight microscopic windows that spit out light. Slide it into the brain of a mouse and it does two jobs that neuroscientists have, for years, been forced to do separately. It eavesdrops ... Read more The post Probe Thinner Than a Hair Can Now Listen to Brain Cells and Boss Them Around at the Same Time appeared first on NeuroEdge.

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Dirty Water Is Now Generating Electricity and Cleaning Itself

A droplet of treated wastewater falls thirty centimetres and strikes a thin plastic film. The impact lasts a fraction of a second. Fifteen LEDs flash on. This happens, over and over, inside a modest laboratory at Lanzhou Jiaotong University, where researchers have built a generator that runs entirely on the kinetic energy of falling sewage, ... Read more The post Dirty Water Is Now Generating Electricity and Cleaning Itself appeared first on SciChi.

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Human Brain Organoids Are Learning to Play Video Games. That Is Only the Beginning.

Start with a skin cell. Bathe it in the right cocktail of chemical signals and it forgets what it is, regressing to a state of biological openness, capable of becoming almost anything. Over the next several months, coax it toward a neural fate. What you end up with, roughly a year after you started, is ... Read more The post Human Brain Organoids Are Learning to Play Video Games. That Is Only the Beginning. appeared first on NeuroEdge.

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Worker Bees, Not Queens, Decide Which Larvae Become Royalty

The queen is not in charge. Not really. In a bumble bee colony, the most consequential decisions about who gets to become the next monarch are made by workers, those smaller, supposedly subordinate females that spend their days hauling pollen and tending to brood. A new study from Penn State has confirmed something rather unsettling ... Read more The post Worker Bees, Not Queens, Decide Which Larvae Become Royalty appeared first on Wild Science.

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Small Towns Are Vanishing From AI’s Imagination

Ask an AI image generator to picture Washington D.C. and it will probably give you the Mall, the monuments, the Potomac glinting in afternoon light. Ask it to picture Blacksburg, Virginia, a college town of roughly 45,000 people tucked into the Appalachian highlands, and something goes wrong. The mountains might be there, the green spaces ... Read more The post Small Towns Are Vanishing From AI’s Imagination appeared first on NeuroEdge.

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Light That Travels a Kilometre Could Be the Backbone of Intelligent 6G Networks

From the roof of a teaching building at South China University of Technology, a beam of white light crossed 1,200 metres of open air and arrived, intact, at a receiver on the other side of the campus. Not a laser line, not a narrow coherent beam of the kind that demands precise alignment and makes ... Read more The post Light That Travels a Kilometre Could Be the Backbone of Intelligent 6G Networks appeared first on SciChi.

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A Chip Holding a Million Materials Could Rewrite How We Find the Stuff Our World Runs On

The chip is about the size of a thumbnail. Under a dark-field microscope it glows faintly, a grid of tiny crystalline specks arranged with the regularity of pixels on a screen. Each speck is a distinct material, a unique combination of atoms no chemist has ever made in bulk, and there are roughly 1.44 million ... Read more The post A Chip Holding a Million Materials Could Rewrite How We Find the Stuff Our World Runs On appeared first on NeuroEdge.

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Dead Snakes in Victorian Jars Reveal Five Species Where Scientists Thought There Was One

Somewhere in a basement drawer at the Natural History Museum in London, sealed in a jar of ethanol that has since outlived the man who collected it, a snake has been sitting. It arrived in 1860, brought back from the Garhwal Himalaya by the brothers von Schlagintweit during a four-year expedition on behalf of the ... Read more The post Dead Snakes in Victorian Jars Revealed Five Species Where Scientists Thought There Was One appeared first on Wild Science.

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When the Queen Dies, the Peacemakers Take Over

Remove a queen from a tropical paper wasp colony and the nest goes to pieces, more or less immediately. Aggression rates jump tenfold within 24 hours. Workers that had spent their days foraging for food drop what they’re doing and start fighting instead, biting, grappling, stinging. Multiple females compete simultaneously for the reproductive vacancy, and ... Read more The post When the Queen Dies, the Peacemakers Take Over appeared first on Wild Science.

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Hurricanes Have Been Releasing Carbon Into the Atmosphere. Climate Change Is Reversing That.

Every year, roughly 90 tropical cyclones spin up across the world’s oceans, each one dragging carbon dioxide out of the sea and flinging it into the air. That, at least, is what most scientists assumed. The problem was that nobody had managed to measure the whole thing properly. Ships don’t sail into hurricanes. Moored sensors ... Read more The post Hurricanes Have Been Releasing Carbon Into the Atmosphere. Climate Change Is Reversing That. appeared first on SciChi.

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New T. Rex Was a Sea Monster, and It Was Hiding in Texas Museum Drawers

The fossil had been catalogued, labelled and largely ignored for years. It sat in the research collection of the American Museum of Natural History under the name Tylosaurus proriger, a moderately famous marine reptile from the Late Cretaceous, the sort of specimen that turns up in mosasaur reviews as a known quantity. Amelia Zietlow, then ... Read more The post New T. Rex Was a Sea Monster, and It Was Hiding in Texas Museum Drawers appeared first on Wild Science.

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Cancer-Seeking Nanomotors Use Light to Unleash a Triple Chemical Attack on Tumors

A bowl-shaped particle, roughly a quarter of a micrometre across, drifts through the bloodstream. It’s wearing a disguise: a fragment of membrane stripped from a breast cancer cell, studded with the same proteins that cancer cells use to recognise each other. The immune system ignores it. The particle reaches a tumour, docks, and waits. Then ... Read more The post Cancer-Seeking Nanomotors Use Light to Unleash a Triple Chemical Attack on Tumors appeared first on SciChi.

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Ancient Tooth Enamel Links Peking Man to People Living Today

A single tooth sits under a microscope in a clean room in Beijing. It is 400,000 years old. The researchers working with it are not allowed to drill into it, grind it down, or section it for analysis. They know that if they damage the morphology, they will have destroyed something irreplaceable. So instead, they ... Read more The post Ancient Tooth Enamel Links Peking Man to People Living Today appeared first on SciChi.

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Teaching Machines to Listen to All Their Sensors at Once

Somewhere inside a large manufacturing plant, a turbofan bearing is beginning to fail. It will not announce this clearly. One vibration sensor picks up a faint irregularity in the x-axis; another registers a slight temperature drift; a third is recording torque anomalies that might mean nothing at all. Each sensor, considered alone, tells only a ... Read more The post Teaching Machines to Listen to All Their Sensors at Once appeared first on NeuroEdge.

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Southeast Asia’s Largest Dinosaur Lay Undiscovered at the Edge of a Village Pond

Hold a ruler alongside a standard doorframe and you get roughly two metres. The front leg bone of Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis is 1.78 metres long. A single limb, roughly as tall as a person, from an animal that nobody in science had heard of until last week. The bone sat in northeastern Thailand’s youngest dinosaur-bearing rock ... Read more The post Southeast Asia’s Largest Dinosaur Lay Undiscovered at the Edge of a Village Pond appeared first on Wild Science.

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Your Scarred Liver Is Already Fighting Back. Scientists Have Just Figured Out How

The liver is, in most respects, forgiving. Damage it repeatedly with alcohol, or hepatitis, or bile that can’t drain, and it will scar. It will tighten and stiffen and lose its architecture over years of insult, eventually becoming the cirrhotic, shrunken organ that kills roughly two million people every year. But it does not simply ... Read more The post Your Scarred Liver Is Already Fighting Back. Scientists Have Just Figured Out How appeared first on SciChi.

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Why a Slower AI Might Actually Feel Smarter to You

Type a question into an AI chatbot and hit send. Now watch the cursor blink. Two seconds feels fine, barely noticeable. Nine seconds and something shifts: you start to wonder if the system is really working through the problem. By the time you hit twenty seconds you have either concluded the AI is doing something ... Read more The post Why a Slower AI Might Actually Feel Smarter to You appeared first on NeuroEdge.

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Your Epigenetic Age Is Aging Your Brain, but Not in the Way Scientists Expected

Inside every cell in your body, a chemical clock is running. Not ticking exactly, more like drifting: patterns of methyl groups latching onto DNA, accumulating and shifting in ways that reflect everything you’ve done, breathed, eaten, and been exposed to across a lifetime. Researchers have spent the better part of two decades trying to read ... Read more The post Your Epigenetic Age Is Aging Your Brain, but Not in the Way Scientists Expected appeared first on NeuroEdge.

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